All posts by katiekhau

After raising almost $600,000 on Kickstarter, Zuta Labs is ready to start production on the printer and is accepting pre-orders from non-Kickstarter backers.

The pre-order price — which Zuta Labs says will be lower than the cost at launch — is $199.99. The printer is available in white and black. It comes with a print cartridge that is good for at least 100 pages. Additional cartridges are available for pre-order.

The wireless printer works for about an hour and is rechargeable via micro USB. Users can print on all sizes of paper and it works without drivers and can print from Macs, PCs iOS and Android.

Since its Kickstarter period, Zuta Labs says it has managed to make the printer smaller and faster than it originally anticipated.

The size — just 10.2 centimeters in diameter — is a big selling point for the product. It is aimed at users who only need a printer infrequently and in places where traditional access — think a coffee shop or at a hotel — is not always applicable. The fact that it also works with smartphones and tablets is a big deal, too. More often than not, I wind up needing to print documents from my phone more than my laptop.

Zuta Labs is aiming to have the Zuta Pocket Printer shipped by September 2015. The company is at CES 2015 showing off demos of the device and taking meetings with potential partners.

Pearce is an inventor and design consultant. He’s worked on non-invasive surgery equipment, early handheld PCs of the Palm Pilot era, 3-D folding mechanisms, and motorbikes. It’s always something new, and in 2007, it was baby strollers. Around that time Pearce was sitting in an airport in the Netherlands, waiting for his flight. He noticed a woman pushing a stroller. “As the woman got to a curb, she didn’t lift the front wheels and the baby was shot forward,” he says. “If the wheel hits the curb at the wrong angle it’s useless. So I just wondered, why can’t you put the suspension into the wheel?”

Baby strollers make for a great case study in how wheels interact with impact, which is to say, not very well at all. A stroller has shock absorbers underneath the seat, which helps reduce bounciness, but it doesn’t keep the wheels from bouncing backwards when they hit a curb head on. In a matter of about five seconds, Pearce had a new idea. He began envisioning a system that incorporated shock absorption directly into the wheels, making them capable of flexibly rolling over bumps instead of just rebounding. He drew a sketch, and then put it aside for two years. At the time, “it wasn’t relevant,” he says. “I couldn’t really see how I could make one, but I have lots of ideas, and this one kept coming back to me.”

After some 70 iterations, Pearce and the team of bow-makers hit on the right recipe. It’s proprietary, but Pearce describes it as a “carbon composite construction.” Loopwheels first debuted on bikes—mountain bikes are next—before a wheelchair manufacturer caught wind of the new wheels and started sourcing them from Pearce. “We say it’s triple-smooth,” Pearce says. The suspension in the wheels smooths out any traveling over bumps, and “gets rid of all the road buzz.” That’s crucial to wheelchair users, whose bodies are in full contact with the vehicle, meaning they often absorb road shock right along with the chair. Equally important to users? Cost. Pearce says he more or less arrived at an ideal design two years ago, but has since worked on refining manufacturing techniques, in part by adopting processes from the auto industry, to get the price down from $2,000 a wheel, to a few hundred dollars (depending on the model). “There’s only so much people will pay for new technology,” Pearce says. That’s true for wheelchairs, and it’s true for mountain bikes, which Pearce says is next in line for Loopwheels.

I’ve been posting a lot about 3D printing recently so I decided to share something a little more analogue today. This is the Triangle Notebook created by Tan Mavitan. It was being sold as a part of “Destination Istanbul” Exhibiton in MoMA Design Stores, but not sure if it still is. Pretty neat notebook and I hope to acquire one someday.

The company Carbon3D came out of two years of stealth mode Monday night with a simultaneous TED Talk and Science paper publication. Their new tech, which they say could be used in industrial applications within the next year, makes coveted 3-D printers the likes of those sold by MakerBot look like child’s play.

Unlike conventional 3D printing, this printer continuously forms a new object, rather than printing it in layers. As a result, it’s much faster than conventional 3D printing (it takes minutes, instead of hours). There are a few different types of existing 3D printers, but they mostly work via the same principle: a printing head passes over a platform over and over, depositing layer after layer of a material like plastic in a precise pattern. Over time, these layers combine to form the desired object — much like a paper printer forms text on a page by putting down row after row of ink. By contrast, this new continuous 3D printer would do away with the layers entirely. Instead, a platform draws the object continuously out of a bath of liquid resin.

The resin solidifies when ultraviolet light hits it (a process called photopolymerization). So to create the desired item, a projector underneath the resin pool shoots UV light, in the form of a series of cross-sectional images of the object. Light, in a sense, is the blade that the printer uses to sculpt its products. Meanwhile, oxygen prevents this reaction from occurring — so to stop the object from simply hardening and sticking to the floor of the pool, there’s a layer of dissolved oxygen there, creating an ultra-thin “dead zone” at the very bottom.

What do you do if you want to 3D print in any direction, but can’t buy a pre-made pen like the 3Doodler? If you’re Vimal Patel, you build your own. He melded a hot glue gun with a powered Lego mechanism (really, Technic) to extrude filament in any axis. To call it bulky would be an understatement, but it works — as you’ll see in the video below, it can produce fairly complex objects as long as you have a keen eye and a steady hand. And if you want to try it, you can. Patel has posted his Lego Digital Designer file for the 3D printing gun, so it shouldn’t be too hard to replicate the invention at home.

UberBlox is a new high-quality metal construction set and prototyping system for makers to build rigid structures and automated machines.

At the heart of the system is a new single-connector locking mechanism which uses a common small tool to quickly and precisely lock each block to the next. The firmly connected blocks provide accurate, strong and rigid frames for a wide variety of structures and complex machines such as robots, CNC machines and 3D printers.

In addition to the basic blocks, the system includes a growing catalog of compatible and reconfigurable parts, including moving components, sub-assemblies, motors, electronics and controllers based on popular boards such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi, for a complete solution to the building needs of today’s sophisticated maker. According to UberBlox founder Alex Pirseyedi,

We believe the time is right to bring a sophisticated high-quality construction system and prototyping set, backed by great support and community engagement, to makers of all levels.

Ultimately, UberBlox aims to be more than just another toy-based construction set: their aim is to be an all-in-one set for today’s sophisticated maker.

Amazon is soon to be coming out with a new device called Echo, which is essentially Siri but for your home.

Amazon Echo is designed around your voice. It’s always on—just ask for information, music, news, weather, and more. Echo begins working as soon as it detects the wake word. You can pick any name as your wake word (I just want to name it TARS or Baymax now). Echo is also an expertly tuned speaker that can fill any room with immersive sound.

Tucked under Echo’s light ring is an array of seven microphones. These sensors use beam-forming technology to hear you from any direction. With enhanced noise cancellation, Echo can hear you ask a question even while it’s playing music. Echo uses on-device keyword spotting to detect the wake word. When Echo detects the wake word, it lights up and streams audio to the cloud, where we leverage the power of Amazon Web Services to recognize and respond to your request. Learn more about Echo’s voice recognition.

You can use Echo for a ton of things, just by asking including:

News, weather, and information: Hear up-to-the-minute weather and news from a variety of sources, including local radio stations, NPR, and ESPN from TuneIn.

This is just really neat and I wanted to share this cool upcoming Sega arcade game. It is called,E~deru Sunaba (translates loosely to “The Surprising Sandbox”) and through the magic of real-time projection mapping, kids can make all sorts of cool things in the sandbox.

According to kids in the video, the sand is very soft and easy to mold. However, it doesn’t stick to your hands. It looks like the game is currently in development, and it could change, but looks super neat!

Earlier this year I did a blog post about KonneKt, an award winning toy for isolated children to play with other children using the window between their hospital rooms and the hallway, designed by Job Jansweijer. It’s been a few months but now it is on Kickstarter!

The game KonneKt transforms the window between the isolated child and the non-isolated child into a canvas for play. The game consists of foam shapes that can be attached to the window between the room of the isolated child and the hallway using suction cups and magnets. By combining the shapes in different ways, children can play games such as tic tac toe, connect four, or build together to make a fantasy world with a dragon and a castle, or a jungle. Because the game can be used in so many ways, it is interesting for both boys and girls of different ages.

The goal of the Kickstarter campaign is to give a KonneKt game to 100 hospitals. People who want to support KonneKt can choose for a ‘Buy one+Give one’ option: they buy one game, and donate the same game to one of the participating hospitals. They can also choose to buy one game, which they can either keep themselves, or give to a hospital. The aim is to collect the needed €30,000 euro in 40 days. The pledged amount will only be charged if the aim of the Kickstarter campaign is met.

Hi everyone, I just wanted to show an update of something I’ve been working on. I’ve been in the works of a board game called Heifer Heist that I am hoping to bring to Kickstarter later this summer! We just launched our new website at heiferheist.com, and we can also be found on Facebook and Twitter. If you like this game, do support us and share, like and follow and I’ll try and keep everyone updated on how when the Kickstarter will be launching and how the process is going!